By: Chloe Amaratunga Brooks
If you’ve ever watched Married at First Sight (MAFS), you know it’s a show filled with drama, blindfolded vows, and a healthy serving of awkward silences when couples realise they’ve just promised to spend their lives with someone they’d swipe left on Tinder. But beyond the chaos, the show sparks conversation on how men perceive and value women, highlighting the tension between superficial attraction and deeper emotional connections and raising a question that’s been haunting society for ages: do men only value women they find physically attractive?
It seems like an obvious ‘yes’ when watching the initial moments of the show–guys standing at the altar, internally debating whether their bride-to-be is their ‘’type’ based on a five-second glance. But is it really just about looks? Or are there deeper layers to this proverbial onion?
At the core of this discussion is female objectification–a phenomenon deeply ingrained in social expectations and media portrayals. After all, sex sells. In popular media, women are so often reduced to what’s visually appealing, to the point where appearances and their value in romantic contexts have just been too heavily entrenched. MAFS emphasises this dynamic, as the initial attraction (or lack thereof) can heavily influence the trajectory of relationships formed on the show before even figuring out if their new wife has a personality beyond the white dress.
This tendency is driven by a cocktail of cultural conditioning, media reinforcement, and perhaps a little bit of the aptly coined ‘Hollywood syndrome’ –where beauty standards act as the benchmark for female worth, and everything else comes second. Men are often taught, consciously or subconsciously (through the syndrome’s namesake), that a woman’s appearance is a key indicator of her worth. And let’s be honest, reality TV thrives on that idea–where first impressions carry significant weight and physical appearance can overshadow other qualities like personality, intellect, and emotional compatibility.
The ‘love at first sight’ trope becomes heavily romanticised in mainstream media, from Disney classics to rom-coms to MAFS, and taps into the fantasy of instant, all-consuming connection that supersedes logic–an idea that is both thrilling and idealistic. And it’s easy to see why this trope is so appealing. In the world of storytelling, love at first sight is a shortcut to intensity, placing characters on an emotional fast track that immediately signals to the audience that something special is happening. For viewers, it’s the promise of an uncomplicated, almost magical experience, and one that validates the idea that love can and should be easy, predestined, and based on an intense initial attraction. When media like MAFS portrays this as ‘love’, it reinforces the notion that physical attraction is the ultimate basis for a romantic connection, sidelining aspects of true intimacy like emotional compatibility and trust. This immediate infatuation bypasses real-life relational dynamics, making it a powerful but superficial narrative tool where attraction takes a backseat to compatibility and objectification runs rife.
Not all objectification is created equal, and certain ‘types’ of women are valued more than others, often aligning with certain social stereotypes. The ‘girl next door’ archetype, for instance, represents conservative beauty traits and is associated with traits like intelligence, kindness, and morality. She’s attractive but in a non-threatening, conventional way. Men see this as a package deal that fits neatly into traditional, non-threatening roles of femininity: beauty wrapped in a neat bow of intelligence, morality, and reliability. This is the type of woman many men on MAFS seem to gravitate toward. Why? Because she’s safe. She doesn’t ruffle feathers with daring fashion choices or controversial opinions. She embodies conservative attractiveness–a low-risk, high-reward investment where men believe they’ll get beauty and stability without all that messy stuff like personal independence or too much boldness. In fact, being ‘girl-next-door attractive’ comes with a bonus halo effect: she’s assumed to be more intelligent and moral by virtue of her simplicity.
On the flip side, we have the women who get unfairly tossed into the ‘dangerous’ category–women who deviate from traditional standards, wear bold clothing, show a little too much skin for some people’s comfort, or (gasp) are more sexually adventurous. According to old-school objectification logic, women who dress provocatively or openly embrace their sexuality are frequently viewed as less intelligent, more immoral, and even harmful in relationships, a perception that is tied to long-standing stigmas around female sexuality, where promiscuity or daring fashion choices can cause women to be dismissed as ‘untrustworthy’ or lacking in depth. Think Curley’s Wife with her red lipstick and the temptation of female sexuality in a male-dominated world–ignore that she is only thought of in relation to her husband and is never seen as a worthwhile individual. But for many men on shows like MAFS, when women break these conservative moulds and become a femme fatale character (exciting, but somehow assumed to be morally corrupt and less intelligent), this is where the judgement goggles come on. These women are viewed as high-risk, perpetuating the persistent conservative idea that if a woman dresses provocatively or is openly sexual, she’s more likely to be ‘harmful’. And so, we have two types of objectification playing out: the girl-next-door versus the femme fatale, in which men often find themselves drawn to the girl-next-door archetype, using the latter and dismissing her worth.
It’s a bizarre equation: promiscuity = threat, while conservativeness = stability.
As we fall deeper into this world of archetypes and tropes, we also have to address how the mother figure or caregiver archetype is often disregarded or sidelined, reducing complex women to the sidelines. Women who don’t fit the “desirable” mould – like mums, grandmothers, or anyone in a nurturing role – often end up invisible in these stories (think Spiderman’s Aunt May). It erases all the amazing qualities caregivers bring to the table, like compassion, strength, and wisdom, making it seem like these traits are unimportant and uninteresting when compared to being romantic or sexy. This setup applied to MAFS rarely leaves room for motherly, caregiver figures who don’t fit the young, glamorous ideal; in fact, they’re usually absent from these shows altogether. Even on shows where contestants are older or have kids, the focus still tends to stay on their ‘dateability’ rather than on other aspects of their lives, reinforcing a narrow, unrealistic view of femininity that overlooks the broader, equally important roles that women play in real life.
And if it couldn’t get worse, the thing that comes up again in every series of MAFS by these problematic men is fatphobia (a relatively modern concept that neglects older ideas of fatness being a sign of beauty and wealth), especially as it intersects with gender beauty standards and plays a significant role in how individuals, particularly women, are valued. Fatness often falls outside of traditional, rigid beauty standards that prize thinness as synonymous with femininity, desirability, and worth. In a fatphobic society, being fat, especially as a woman, means being more likely to be on the receiving end of abuse and constantly being viewed as automatically less feminine, less worthy, or less of everything really, because it doesn’t fit the narrow mould of what is deemed attractive or valuable. On shows like MAFS, where initial physical attraction can heavily influence how relationships evolve, fat people are disproportionately overlooked or criticised, reinforcing the idea that only those who meet absurd beauty standards deserve love or emotional connection. Meanwhile, thinness equals safety and romance? In reality, this creates a harmful narrative where fatness is not just devalued but seen as incompatible with romance, desirability, and femininity, which perpetuates fatphobia in mainstream media.
While it is reductive to blame all men for subscribing to such a harmful narrative, the success of MAFS among (particularly) male viewers remains indicative of a larger problem. Men, in many cases, are implicitly taught to value women based on how closely they align with rigid beauty standards, sometimes at the expense of deeper connections and understanding. The result? We’re left with a show that provides endless entertainment but perpetuates shallow judgments. And while we all know that reality TV casts flawed characters to drive views, these personalities keep appearing and are not confined to these shows.
At the end of the day, shows like MAFS serve as a mirror to society’s continued grappling with female objectification, where reality TV continues to play into the problematic idea that women must be neatly categorised into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ based on how they look or behave, as though womens’ complexity and beauty can be distilled into the length of a hemline or her clothes size. And while many of us may feel we have progressed as an inclusive society in terms of romantic preferences, the success of MAFS says otherwise. But how do we combat these ideas of unfair female archetypes and introduce richer, more meaningful portrayals of romance in the media? By shifting to more egalitarian love stories – ones where both partners actively choose each other and communicate their interests – the narrative becomes more balanced. This doesn’t just subvert old-fashioned gender roles; it also presents relationships as partnerships built on reciprocity rather than conquest. And it’s about time we stopped ‘loving’ at first sight as a society and teach others to love whole, complex individuals instead.
